Was ist Integral Zen?

At Integral Zen, we use the zazen, kinhin, and koans from traditional Rinzai Zen. We also use the Five Training Elements and the transformative practice of Mondo Zen to re-orient, mature and enlighten our ego and our emotional bodies. In addition to these, we add the conceptual framework of Integral Theory and more rigorous forms of individual and collective psychological shadow work.

With Integral language and a deep meditative practice, we are able to discuss complex topics with greater understanding, clarity, and compassion. By using Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, including his AQAL map – all levels, lines, types, states, and quadrants – the territory of our lives comes alive.

This map allows greater compassion for ourselves and others, since it empowers us to stop imposing our unconscious assumptions about the world onto nearly every place we touch it. And yet, the map is not the territory, and Integral Zen is ruthless in its distinction between intellectual understanding, experiential understanding, and spiritual insight.

Meditative practitioners with deep spiritual insight often suffer from a too-partial view of the cosmos. Integralists with sophisticated maps of the world often suffer from a lack of experiential insight about the true nature of their minds.

The complexity of an evolutionary, 21st Century spirituality cannot be understood without a common language. An Integral View, combined with a stable spiritual insight, greatly enhances the level of clarity, predictability, and understanding within our community. We are able to more profoundly connect with ourselves and each other.

We understand our own Zen practice through an empowering yet humbling lens that allows us to understand better what we have realized, and what we have yet to discover.

Integral Zen and Personal and Collective Psychological Shadow

The process of awakening is the very process of making what is unconscious, conscious. But we cannot enlighten the parts of our mind that we cannot see, no matter how deep our spiritual insight or how vast our intellectual knowledge.

You can be deeply awake or a great scholar, and still be a reactive and petty jerk in your own life! In our experience, a person’s ability to fully awaken is directly tied to his or her ability and willingness to face psychological shadow material. If you’re human you have it, without exception.

Integral Zen recognizes that each one of us has aspects of his or herself that are undeveloped, no matter the depth of spiritual insight. Within the unique paths that have led us to where we are, there are steps that are often missed. Therefore we examine what steps were missed in our own development. We then choose to consciously make room for and encourage each other to develop in these specific areas.

Integral Zen includes many forms of psychological shadow work to illuminate our disowned and false selves. When we disown part of ourselves we automatically create a lie, a story about who we are that is not true. This is what Jung called the persona, Voice Dialogue calls the primary self, and Wilber calls the false self. When this shadow, the disowned self, is reintegrated into the personality, there is no need to continue to lie to ourselves. The false self is seen through, discarded and replaced with a more authentic sense of self that includes the disowned parts.